VS Ramachandran and the Neurology of Self-Awareness

A friend forwarded me a great article today from Edge.org, in which noted neuropsychologist V.S. Ramchandran explains the emergence of self-awareness through specific brain circuitry. I've only had a chance to skim the article so far but it looks very interesting. Here he describes the initial discovery of the specific neural networks possibly responsible for awareness of the self:

These were dubbed "mirror neurons" or "monkey-see-monkey-do" neurons. This was an extraordinary observation because it implies that the neuron (or more accurately, the network which it is part of) was not only generating a highly specific command ("reach for the nut") but was capable of adopting another monkey's point of view. It was doing a sort of internal virtual reality simulation of the other monkeys action in order to figure out what he was "up to". It was, in short, a "mind-reading" neuron.